I. Field
The following description relates generally to wireless communications, and more particularly to providing a mechanism for having a flexible pilot pattern in an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as, for example, voice, data, and so on. Typical wireless communication systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing available system resources (e.g., bandwidth, transmit power, . . . ) Examples of such multiple-access systems may include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, 3GPP LTE systems, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), localized frequency division multiplexing (LFDM), orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, and the like.
In a wireless communication system, a Node B (or base station) may transmit data to user equipment (UE) on a downlink and/or receive data from the UE on an uplink. The downlink (or forward link) refers to a communication link from Node B to the UE, and the uplink (or reverse link) refers to a communication link from the UE to Node B. Node B may also send control information (e.g., assignments of system resources) to the UE. Similarly, the UE may send control information to the Node B to support data transmission on the downlink, or for other purposes.
In state of the art systems a multicast/broadcast transmission mode is used where Node B may transmit to multiple UEs operating within the system. It would be feasible to operate multicast/broadcast (point to multipoint) transmissions as a single frequency network (SFN) and take advantage of higher enhanced data rate provided by the SFN transmission. The SFN allows one or more neighboring cells to transmit same content on a same sub-channel during downlink. However, SFN transmission may not be efficient if an entire portion of bandwidth is used on the downlink when other non-data information is also required to be transmitted.